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| Surrender Sheikha Nassery Bonnin The philosopher exhausted himself with
thinking (figuring out)
Bismillaah ir Rahmaan ir Rahiim It is important to be clear about to whom
we surrender, what we surrender and how we surrender. Ordinarily we surrender to our ego. It is
so automatic that most of the time we don’t even notice it. Once some
knowledge has been gained and progress made, the first sign of being a
true traveller of the path (salek) appears with a fundamental shift. This
shift is about constantly trying to surrender to God instead of
surrendering to the demands and desires of the ego-personality or 'nafs'. We must ask ourselves, what are we
surrendering? It is not our wealth, the ones we love, nor our possessions.
God has no desire for those things. We are surrendering our
ego-personality (nafs), because it is the very instrument that forms the
obstacle in getting close to God, and God's desire is for us to get close
to Him and to know Him. Then the question remains, how do we
surrender to God? We must surrender the instruments of the ego, which are
our mind, our emotions and our desires. Our ego-personality has dominated
because of these instruments, or rather these weapons. Imagine, that
within us is an enemy who has controlled our psyche, armed with these
weapons, therefore the only way to fight him and subdue him, is by taking
away those weapons. However this is not an easy task since we have come to
believe that the personality is us, and that we are the personality. A
certain degree of awakening is required in order to realise that there is
more to us, and that the personality is only an outer veil covering the
inner or essential self. Yet we have formed attachments to this structure
and we identify that as our identity. Adding to the problem is the
manipulative nature of the ego. This makes us, (to borrow the Sufi idiom),
fall almost every time that we want to mount the donkey of the nafs and
pull its reins, only to find that the next minute we are walking behind
the donkey in the direction it wants to go. The ego has had a full run of
us and has become a formidable force that will not give up easily. This
internal struggle against one’s nafs was described by the Prophet (pbuh)
as the greater Jihad (war) - greater than the wars in the battlefield. The journey of life is about wearing the
cloak of the personality in order to cover our true self and become self
conscious, while being given the chance to discard the cloak and return to
the state of Divine consciousness. This is what we have been created for.
The most important requirements on our part are to have sincerity and
faith. If we have that, then the help from the unseen as well as help in
the form of a guide or teacher will appear. The human dilemma appears to be that the
human soul is caught between the Divine/angelic forces, and the ego/animal
forces. When the force of the ego pulls us down, the lower forces seek to
bring about disorder and disharmony within us and in our life in order to
keep us down and gain control. On the other hand if the soul moves into
the higher realm, the lower forces don’t have as much access and control
over us, and we now receive help from that realm, (unless we slip and have
to fight our way back again). This is one of the reasons that in Sufism
there is a lot of emphasis on spending time around sincere seekers and
staying away from people who are ego driven. Because, according to the law
of “like attracts like”, it would be easy to get attracted and slip. To ascend to the higher realm we need to
surrender our self. To surrender our self, we must surrender our thoughts,
emotions and desires. Ironically, by surrendering, we will be able to
receive and respond to whatever God sends our way without the distortions
of the ego-personality. I was talking with my Sheikh on the phone
the other day and he said, “I don’t think, I only do what is put in
front of me”. My inner ear heard the inner meaning of this statement and
I experienced its transcending effect. Imagine, doing and responding to
what God puts in front of us without being trapped in one’s emotions and
thoughts. As soon as one allows the mind, emotion or desire to get in,
different possibilities and judgements appear and one is taken out of the
unity, and is thrown into the realm of multiplicity and fragmentation of
the personality. Prophet Jesus (pbuh) said God is always
with us if we can surrender ourselves to Him and if we can love Him more
than anything else, more than ourselves. God consciousness has already been put in
the heart of every child of Adam. When we surrender the self, then God's
Will moves through us and our actions will become His actions. All we need
to do is to surrender our belief of self-sovereignty and otherness. This
is the real meaning of sacrifice - sacrificing the pseudo-self in order to
reach the Divine Self. What keeps us from that union is the “me-ness”
placed in between. Speaking of this reality, Hafez the Persian
Sufi poet says: God is with us all the time. If He were not
with us we would not even be able to stand on our feet nor take a step. In
the Qurân Allah (swt) says “I am closer to you than your jugular
vein”. So He is always close and present. But we are not present with
Him. We are busy with ourselves through our thoughts, emotions and
desires. Even when we are hoping to get close to him, by hoping and
thinking and desiring we get further away from Him. We cannot be mindful
of Him if we are mindful of ourselves. When we think or desire, we are in
the element of “self”, and the harder we try to get close the further
away we become. The philosopher exhausted himself with
thinking (figuring out) Rumi, Masnavi, VI:2356-8 Source: Australian Sufi Centre http://www.australiansuficentre.org/teachings_surrender.htm |